Hello everyone!
The only thing more surprising than seeing an official post from us here is our announcing that S2HD is no longer dead.

You read that correctly: work has once again begun on Sonic 2 HD! That said, we'd like to give you all a brief tie-in for recent events leading to the project's reboot.

As many of you know, the leading reason behind the project's cancellation was due to the programming element being removed with no possibility of return in its existing form. As of last year, this changed. Before anyone raises the question, no, the former programmer and the S2HD team members have not had a reunion; instead, a fan of the project independently created and submitted his own engine to Vincent, the project leader, for evaluation. After integrating the art assets from the alpha release and successfully testing it, Vincent began to let the rest of the prior team members know, and we've picked up where we left off sans those who are unavailable due to real life obligations. Two other talented programmers have since offered their skills to recreate the game's physics to match the original, and to port the game to the Mac OS platform (the latter of which is still in the earliest possible stage, and we have no estimate on when it will be playable, so stay tuned!).

In response to some of the questions we have seen, the Alpha Release build is officially discontinued and will not get any form of support as we do not have the source code. The next release will be entirely new programming from the ground up.
We'll provide more details in how you can help us out in the next few days. It's good to be back!

So hopefully this time around is more prosperous then the last time. but we'll see...

There was quite the crapstorm in the past, but hey, no hard feelings here with me! /> Nearly the whole team were great people, I've got nothing against them.

So I'm excited as a rabbit in a cabbage patch that this project is back on its rails! I'm also glad there are multiple programmers this time too. That's going to be ideal for redeveloping the technical side of things again.

Because this game is a port of an existing game, it probably would have been fine to have the art team just get 100% of the art done first then seek a programming team afterwards. Sure it makes a demo take longer to appear but it would have also gotten one of the major development stages completely knocked out. There wouldn't have had to have been a falling out with one team or another because the other team wouldn't have been formed yet.

I think feature-wise, the HD port would have quite a few things to top, but the whole point of the remake is to beautify the game and bring it into the HD space. Other things like online play, Hidden Palace, and the infamous spike pit, might be secondary goals, but nobody inside the team has said what they're planning yet. Lord knows what they'll do with Casino Nights Zone alone, I can only imagine how incredible that will look.

The Game Collector, on 23 June 2014 - 09:42 PM, said:

Because this game is a port of an existing game, it probably would have been fine to have the art team just get 100% of the art done first then seek a programming team afterwards. Sure it makes a demo take longer to appear but it would have also gotten one of the major development stages completely knocked out. There wouldn't have had to have been a falling out with one team or another because the other team wouldn't have been formed yet.

That's an interesting idea, but it's also important the programmers and artists are on the same page with each other as well. For instance, depending on how they want to revisit the background art for each zone, some things may need amending or reworking in the assets to work with the engine, or the artists may suggest new features for the engine. I'm being horribly vague, but you probably get the idea.

About finishing off all the art assets first: You also have to understand that it kind of was an era where projects rarely ever get completed. You'd be hard pressed to find a bunch of people who want to put a shit ton of effort into something that might not ever see the light of day other than pretty mockups.